Here are some recent news and science articles on antibiotic resistance that I found this afternoon: Some not so happy stories – Intestinal microbiome is related to lifetime antibiotic use in Finnish pre-school children Antimicrobial resistance a challenge to public health: Nadda Some happy/cool stories – Audiocast: Developing new antimicrobial drugs and alternatives Bills would prohibit livestock …
For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …
Guest Blog Post by Dr. Nick Clements, PhD Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Colorado Boulder, Miller Research Group In the event of a disaster, hospitals must have plans in place for receiving a surge of patients with a variety of possible infectious diseases or conditions. Pandemic-causing infectious diseases, such as the viruses that caused the SARS …
Having been camped out in Portland, OR this week to speak at the 2014 Joint Aquatic Sciences Meeting, I woke up this morning to find a “boil water alert” had been issued for the entire city. Repeated testing over the last few days has found fecal contamination (E. coli) in the city’s reservoirs. So that means a lockdown …
“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …
In November, 2012, Curtis Huttenhower began work (with funding from the Sloan Foundation) to examine the transmission of human-associated microbes by public transportation surfaces. An article on “Big Data” in the current issue of Harvard Magazine includes a description of Huttenhower’s work in the lead article “Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal.” After very …
Yersinia pestis, Direct Fluorescent Antibody Stain (DFA), 200x Magnification. CDC 2057. Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. “Black death was not spread by rat fleas, say researchers” reported in the Guardian Reportedly it was “pneumonic” rather than “bubonic” as previously thought. Fortunately it was a very, very long time ago, although there have been many …
Sept. 18, 2013. Magill House – I’m in a B&B that was once a cure cottage in the Adirondack town of Saranac Lake, New York, where for more than 70 years tuberculosis patients came from the big city hoping that the cold mountain air would cure their disease. Half the houses had TB patients near …
In their just published paper in Environmental Science & Technology, “Tetracycline Resistance and Class 1 Integron Genes Associated with Indoor and Outdoor Aerosols,” Alison L. Ling, Norman R. Pace, Mark T. Hernandez, and Timothy M. LaPara have found that genes escape the indoor environment and can be found 2 km away. The abstract can be …
The Germ Guy is today’s microBEnet microbiology’s Blog of the Day. Blogs are taken from list of Microbiology Blogs we have curated at microBEnet. The germ guy blog is by Jason “Germ Guy” Tetro and it focuses on “A personal and unique look at germs, hygiene and staying healthy.” He is pretty active in media and social media (e.g., follow him on …